Directions: Fill in the blanks in the first six paragraphs of the article “Anarchy in the Met” by Jon Caramanica.

Use your own words and phrases, or scroll to the end of the post to choose from a scrambled list of the words or phrases that were removed. Another option? Read, or listen to someone read, the original article first,
then fill in the blanks from memory.

Everyone loves a uniform. In both the mainstream and the counterculture, _____ connote order and authority. They shape the story. They make things easy. _____ the wearer, they stand in for having to speak. For the _____,
they serve as shorthand.

They are also constraints, _____ course. Punk, in its original incarnation in the 1970s, was _____ to be an angry rejoinder to all that. Skinheads, teddy boys, mods, rockers: they all _____ a comprehensible, consistent
look. Punks scrambled it all, cutting it to pieces and stitching it together in _____ ways. It was a raised middle finger to the long legacy of the uniform — except for the fact, of course, that it was one
itself.

The uniform of no uniform became punk’s loudest _____ most lasting aesthetic legacy, probably to its detriment. It was an easy caricature, a readily reproducible _____ of working-class angst.

“Punk: Chaos to Couture,” the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on view starting May 9, _____ the dots between punk’s anti-formal innovations and high fashion’s borrowings —
or outright copyings — of them. _____ the title is a bit misleading. Certainly decay and disorder were ______ to punk’s ideology, but the chaos was always controlled, and the chaos was always couture.
Punk may have been a deconstruction, but it _____ an accident.

Juxtaposing the old garments with the tributes, as the exhibition does, _____ the punk items as found gems rescued and resuscitated by keen-eyed designers with traditional skill sets — an eruption of happenstance
into the mainstream. But punk’s own rule book — its costume of anarchy — was plenty powerful _____ anyone was looking. The desecration of logos and images, the _____ shoddy construction, the
mixing of references, the emphasis on hard as well as soft — these were key tenets of the style that demanded adherence. They were styles to _____, and also models for living.

And these visions _____ fast, creating looks that settled in at different intensity levels on either side of the Atlantic. In New York, the dominant models were the morose, dry-wit sartorialism of Richard Hell, who
famously stenciled the phrase “please kill me” on a T-shirt, or the burnout chic of the Ramones, _____ their black leather jackets and airtight ripped jeans. Understated and tattered, they were surprisingly
elegant, ______ a lot with only a few gestures.